Archive for October, 2009

I have also participated in the conference Sensious Knowledge at Solstrand, Bergen (September 23-25) and made a presentation in International Contemporary Music days in Gothenburg (October 2-3 rd 2009) During the seminar at Solstrand we heard many interesting presentations, but the most interesting thing was for me to meet other artist outside my field. In the conference in Gothenburg was about the boundaries of interpretation and practical Artistic research and was very interesting for my project. I did the presentation together with Henrik Hellstenius. I also played some excerpts of Victoria Counts II during the presentation.

Video-analysis and CatArt

Having the second workshop together with Alexander R Jensenius (October 5-6) has given me more understanding about how CatArt works. Again using a fairly big space at the Academy (4x4m) gave us the possibility to go through many different parameters in CatArt to evaluate what works the best. In this space it works best if the grains are fairly evenly distributed like in preset 2:Spectral centroid periodicity Loudness. Using this preset I am then able to use the whole space to interact. It also works best if the sounds we use are not too brutal and strong. (crush does not work so well as pizzicato and flageolets)

Working with open form

October 7-9 we had rehearsals for the open form festival in November practising Else Storesunds piece Liquid Vapour. The piece is based on schemes and graphs from a research book about water. We use these schemes as a starting point and ground for improvisations where the theme is water.

September 29+29 I did a recording of Victoria Counts II by Henrik Hellstenius. The recording took place in my studio at the Academy. Mats Claesson kindly agreed to record the music and make a “nice” sound of my electric violin. We used his equipment from his studio and my speakers for listening back. Henrik Hellstenius was producing and Edvin Østvik did the live electronics. The result will appear as an installation in Lydgalleriet in Bergen opening at November 13.

I arranged in cooperation NMH an international workshop on hyperimprovisation where the theme was; own practise with real-time improvisation and augmented instruments. The seminar took place at NMH during Ultima festival from 15-17 September 2009.

I have during the conference met some of the best international performers working in my field. I made a presentation of my project during this conference and got a lot of important feedback. I had the possibility to discuss musical, aesthetical and technical questions more informally with the participants during the seminar. To put the music, improvisation own practise and interaction with the computer as the main topic has been missing in many conferences such as NIME and ICMC etc.

I hope to arrange this seminar on annual basis and refine and sharpen the topic.

I have got written feedback from the participants and this feedback will be important for forthcoming seminars.